I have been trying to write.
I have been staring at this sentence for the last 15 minutes. I have been typing slowly. Try-i-n-g-t-o-w-r-i – t – e. 20 minutes.
Words don’t come to me. Remember how you feel when you drink milk, 5 sips too many? You feel like you are about to puke but you just walk around trying to keep in, make more comfortable inside something that refuses to come out. You give in to the adamant-ness of the milk. That’s what words are doing to me. But I am no quitter, I want to make a mockery of these stubborn words and use them to suffer the lack of them. They told me “look at this photo and write what it says to you,” I think it wants me to write about love. About companionship and its forms. Marriage, maybe. Or just this teen-agey fiercely passionate and hopeful to the end of anger kind of love. Or that one, the one which feels like a tight jacket: keeps you warm but suffocates you just enough to make you wonder if you need air or warmth more. Have you ever felt like blaming your parents for loving you a certain way or do you blame yourself for seeking what they could not provide for in other humans? Do you feel like accepting more than the love you think you deserve?
Actually, I don’t want to write about love. I want to write about this newfound sense of smell I have discovered. I want to tell you about the Raatranis I smell before going home every day. “But your photos and text never make sense together. Why don’t you just post the photos? The writing ruins them.” Okay. I will talk about the super-special people I met at the office and how our low self-esteems tie us together. Maybe the photo wants me to talk more about this girl that uses Instagram to love me. She knows I am not okay if I behave weirdly on Instagram. She sends me books that I carry everywhere and which I sleep next to every night. How she virtually holds my hand silently. On Instagram. Oh! And about this boy, a little boy who smells his Rohal Dhal book before starting to read it. I think the photo wants me to write something which uses the phrase ‘Aristocratically hyphenated’ in it. Pillows. I will write about pillows. I think this photo has run out of words